Annual credit investor update

Our ambition is to build a stronger, greener, healthier North West on behalf of customers, communities and the environment. Despite a challenging year of cost pressures, we have delivered our best ever performance on a range of measures that matter most to customers, including leakage, water quality and serious pollution incidents. To help ease cost of living pressures, we have provided financial support to over 330,000 customers so far this regulatory period and have continued to play a key role in the wider economy of the North West, supporting 22,000 jobs across the region.

We are acutely aware that this is a critical time for the water sector, with many challenges facing us, especially around river health. In the North West, we have delivered a 39 per cent reduction in reported activations from storm overflows since 2020, but there is a lot more to do and we have ambitious plans to go further and faster to drive a real step change. With the support of our regulators we are accelerating investment, making a start on improvements for one third of the overflows we are targeting in AMP8. As a result we will be investing a further £200 million in the next two years.

In October we will be putting forward an ambitious plan for the next regulatory period, including our biggest environmental programme yet, targeting a significant improvement in storm overflow performance. It is clear that we need to invest in infrastructure, assets and our people to meet new environmental targets and deliver the further performance improvements customers and communities want to see. We are committed to delivering even better performance and we are looking forward to the opportunity to do so.